Semiconductor memory devices are important components in presently available industrial and consumer electronics products. For example, computers, mobile phones, and other portable electronics all rely on some form of memory for storing data. Many memory devices are available as commodity, or discrete memory devices, but also the need for higher levels of integration and higher input/output (I/O) bandwidth has led to the development of embedded memory, which can be integrated with systems, such as microcontrollers and other processing circuits.
Most consumer electronics employ, non-volatile devices, such as flash memory devices, for storage of data. Demand for flash memory devices has continued to grow significantly because these devices are well suited in various applications that require large amounts of non-volatile storage, while occupying a small physical area. For example, flash is widely found in various consumer devices, such as digital cameras, cell phones, universal serial bus (USB) flash drives and portable music players, to store data used by these devices. Also, flash devices are used as solid state drives (SSDs) for hard disk drive (HDD) replacement. Such portable devices are preferably minimized in form factor size and weight. Unfortunately, multimedia and SSD applications require large amounts of memory which can increase the form factor size and weight of their products. Therefore, consumer product manufacturers compromise by limiting the amount of physical memory included in the product to keep its size and weight acceptable to consumers. Furthermore, while flash memory may have a higher density per unit area than DRAM or SRAM, its performance is typically limited due to its relatively low I/O bandwidth that negatively impacts its read and write throughput.
In order to meet the ever-increasing demand for and ubiquitous nature of applications of memory devices, it is desirable to have high-performance memory devices, i.e., devices having higher I/O bandwidth, higher read and write throughput, and increased flexibility of operations.